The importance of self-service to local government
Council customer services have struggled to achieve a high proportion of self-service adoption due to a variety of factors such as ongoing resident preference to use channels such as phone and email, as well as the impact of poor experiences from some digital alternatives.
The critical factor driving this challenge is a high proportion of contact centre inbound traffic continues to occur via channels such as phone, email, and live chat, all of which are exclusively managed by humans. Many website chatbots have not delivered a high enough user experience to shift a significant proportion of queries to self-service – in fact, research shows only 18% of digital self-service is currently managed by AI and automation (via online forms and chatbots)*.
Self-service is crucial for local government organisations as it allows them to provide essential services at a lower cost per contact, especially in the face of shrinking funding and increasing demand. Additionally, as staff shortages are a common issue in the public sector, self-service allows councils to address residents’ needs digitally without placing additional strain on overworked staff.
As Conversational AI becomes increasingly prevalent in modern organisations, local councils are exploring how AI-driven technology can be leveraged to enhance customer service for their residents.
Triple self-service adoption with AI
The latest developments in AI-driven content with ChatGPT by OpenAI are taking the world by storm, with its incredible ability to expertly answer questions and create content around unregulated public information.
By combining the power of ChatGPT with the SMART Local Government language model covering over 1,000 sector-specific topics, ICS.AI SMART Customer Service solution addresses the self-service challenges and triples the proportion of contacts handled by digital self-service.
SMART Customer Services achieves this level of resident self-service by focusing on high human traffic channels such as phone, email and live chat, as well as the traditional website chatbot channel.
How does SMART Customer Service work?
SMART Customer Service combines the power of both the SMART AI platform and ChatGPT to provide a more efficient customer service experience.
ICS.AI SMART AI guarantees human parity outcomes, with a 92% first-time query resolution rate compared to 84% for the average human contact centre agent. Additionally, SMART AI can be deployed on any contact channel, providing flexibility for residents. ChatGPT enhances the customer experience, by expanding its capability of conversational engagement on any general topic.
The integration of SMART AI and ChatGPT creates a truly human-like experience, with the potential to improve performance even further.
How does ChatGPT integration help end-users?
ChatGPT integration improves the user experience by expanding the range of categories and services that SMART Customer Service can support. The integration provides an ability to understand complex, verbose or confusing requests, and enables automation and dialogue creation, language model training and testing. Thanks to ChatGPT’s advanced conversational capabilities, SMART Customer Service allows users to re-phrase their queries and receive more accurate answers.
Thanks to the combined access to both private organisational information (through SMART AI language models) and general-knowledge content (through ChatGPT), SMART Customer Service offers a well-rounded and unique Conversational AI experience for users.
Key enhancements with ChatGPT integration:
Improved understanding of complex queries
Enhanced handling of casual conversation and small talk (chit chat)
Increased flexibility of adding internal topics
More natural and resilient telephony conversations
More efficient training of language models
Greater ability to create custom language models more quickly
SMART Customer Service deflection rates
ICS.AI are already helping local government customers achieve impressive deflection rates with digital self-service through human parity conversational AI across contact channels:
SMART Phone – Achieving 60% deflection
SMART AI Live Chat – Achieving 75% deflection
SMART AI Email – Achieving 70% deflection
SMART AI Chatbot – Achieving 40% deflection
Transform customer service for councils
As the UK market leaders in AI transformation, ICS.AI are already helping customers achieve significant self-service adoption. ChatGPT has the potential to transform the user experience even further.
With SMART Customer Service, ICS.AI are utilising the power of human parity SMART AI and ChatGPT for the benefit of the local government end-users, integrating ChatGPT to further improve customer experience and outcomes across all contact channels.
Webinar - join us on 1 March to find out more
Join us for a special event showcasing how SMART AI combined with ChatGPT can triple resident self-service and enhance customer services for your council – register here
*Source: ChatGPT Jan 2023
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